Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim

Informal Invitation to a Traveler is an epistolary exchange that exists uniquely apart from conventions of time and place. Alternately spare and lavish, a ghost narrative emerges of correspondences, echoes, and distances-raising questions of travel and renewal, home and seasons, abandonment and flight. With charm and intelligence, Hoag's and McCord's poems speak to each other, at each other, with and without each other. They are lively, keen, restless. They envision among the "rubbles of the cities" the possibility of a "home that lasts." -JAMES HAUG, author of Legends of the Recent Past Part baedeker, part intimate murmur, the poems in Informal Invitation to a Traveler suggest that identity itself is a kind of collaboration, a murky alchemy of thought, image, and language. At these poetic intersections, we find two voices bewitched by their own and one another's incongruities. What emerges is a dazzling study of perception: "How in one town we might be burning the monster,/and the next find ourselves listening to tides." -- KARA CANDITO, author of Taste of Cherry "The bridge of two voices across a landscape--one gorgeous, effusive, and intimate, the other stark and sorting. And the landscape? Flecked with small berries, nodes of sweetness, and hard weather, hard ground, and mazes of pretty but harming brambles. As you wake up here, poem by poem, Hoag and McCord invite you to consider what it means to let oneself wander and how much is enough. Evoking by turns whimsy, resolve, and dread, this is a terrific collaboration." -JOE HALL, Author of Pigafetta is My Wife